(1) It is bad enough that the minimum wage required by law is hardly generous, yet there we were again last week confronted with reports of delivery company Hermes exploiting workers , HM Revenue & Customs widening its investigation into the notorious wages shirker Sports Direct and a challenge to Uber’s employment practices.
(2) Only those with very long memories could recall the former Labour health minister’s call in 2013 for the coalition government to drop “the strivers versus shirkers rhetoric” .
(3) We urge all party leaders to tackle the deficit fairly, to repair the recent damage to the social security system and to cease misleading, and divisive, rhetoric such as “strivers” and “shirkers”.
(4) In other words – and ironically in view of the coalition’s rhetoric – many of those forced to claim the working-age benefits targeted for further cuts are not what the prime minister calls “shirkers” but, in fact, “hard working families”.
(5) The stories of the "rotten shirker" butcher of Finchley, of the German baker whose shop was destroyed by crowds shouting anti-German abuse, and of the last son at home whose four brothers had already died in the first world war are revealed in records released online by the National Archives at Kew .
(6) But such is the toxicity of the shirkers-versus-strivers message, delivered by all the leading political parties, that facts are no longer believed.
(7) Osborne gloried in his depiction of his actions in support of the nation's "strivers" and attack on the shirkers.
(8) He loathed the way the chancellor framed arguments about benefits as “strivers versus shirkers”.
(9) Having waged war on shirkers – be they old, disabled, single parents – all now scrabble to be on the side of "workers".
(10) Meanwhile, at the launch of a report on poverty published by the Church in Wales and Oxfam Cymru on Tuesday, the archbishop led calls for citizens to question false stereotypes of those in poverty as shirkers and skivers.
(11) The Tories need to promise something for ordinary voters but Labour has also been busy talking about itself as the party "of work", for no one wants to be seen as the shirkers' party, though globalisation means the world of work is a deeply insecure place.
(12) Miliband’s “zero-zero” was a rhetorical flourish, calling for better pay and clawing back the £34bn (some say much more) from the evaders and avoiders and the Luxembourg shirkers, from Dyson to Amazon.
(13) They play a trio of shirkers dodging trench service during the First World War.
(14) As in our previous communication, we continue to be worried by grossly misleading rhetoric concerning those who have to seek support from the welfare state, such as the contrast between “strivers” and “shirkers” , which risks undermining trust not only among different sections of society but also across generations.
(15) To be sure, some countries are worse than others, with the United States topping the list of responsibility shirkers.
(16) He said Osborne had set out a false choice between strivers in work and shirkers out of work and on benefit, saying 60% of families hit by the tax and benefit changes set out in the chancellor's autumn statement last week were in work.
(17) When the coalition capped benefit rises at 1%, it was not, in the main, the jobless “shirker” who suffered.
(18) Any genuinely progressive LGBT activism would challenge the divisive narrative of workers and shirkers, strivers and scroungers, and address the growing social and economic inequalities that leave vulnerable LGBT people prey to poverty, violence and discrimination.
(19) Harvey is a telling target: a fitting symbol of the myth that it is the shirkers and spongers around us who are to blame for our ills.
(20) To recap: as a desperate Conservative party scrabbles around for anything approaching a sense of purpose, David Cameron and George Osborne are sounding ever more shrill about the supposed divide between "workers" and "shirkers", or "strivers" and "skivers"; and this latest proposal is aimed at alchemising popularity from prejudice by capping most working-age benefits – including tax credits – at 1% a year until 2015, severing the link between social security (can we use that term, rather than that ideologically loaded US import "welfare"?)